For the love of cars: Mt. Pleasant man turns passion into hobby

Mt. Pleasant resident Neal Travis, right, and Ed Geroux of Lake work on restoring Travis' 1969 Dodge Super Bee in Travis' garage Thursday, May 2, 2013. "It will be better than a new car when we are done," said Travis.(Sun photo by KENKADWELL/@KenKadwell).

“I was a young kid, 9, 10 years old when the muscle car era was going around,” the Mt. Pleasant resident said. “I can remember seeing them around town. All the flashy colors, big tires and loud noise, I just liked, I guess.”

Travis said he loves the process of restoring a car, watching a piece of metal go from a stripped down shell to a fully function, beautiful vehicle.

Now, he spends his free time restoring classic cars he purchases online.

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Travis said even in high school, he and an old friend had old cars, so it just made sense to pick up restoring them as a hobby.

The first car Travis started restoring was a dark green 1969 Plymouth Road Runner he obtained off of eBay.

The car, originally from California, ended up in Ohio, where Travis picked it up.

The car came complete and rust-free, just needing restoration of its 1970s gray primer with black stripes.

“We pretty much dismantled the whole car, 90 percent of it,” he said.

Travis had a friend do the body work and paint while he did the interior.

Travis said he got the Super Bee after a trip that took him across the United States.

At the time, Travis flew out to Utah to accompany a friend who was buying a car.

While there, Travis saw a photo of the Super Bee. He inquired about it, and was told it was sold two years earlier to someone in New York.

“Five years later, (I) saw an ad on the Internet for a Super Bee in New York,” Travis said.

“The guy out there had the same exact picture of the car that was sitting in Utah.”

Travis took the Super Bee home to work on it.

Right now, he said, the car is three-quarters of the way done with its restoration.

Travis said he’s working on fixing the car up to drive it on a daily basis.

The car needs to have the interior and exhaust reinstalled.

It’s three weeks from completion, Travis said, after the project started two years ago.

Travis had the car sandblasted and primed before taking a five-or-so year break.

He had the paint done in January of 2012 before Travis started outfitting the car with the engine, transmission and drive train.

“There was virtually nothing left to the car,” he said. “There was hardly a bolt on it when we started.”

Travis hardly drives the bright blue Road Runner, and isn’t much of a car show person, he explained.

Because his friends have helped him extensively with his project cars, he’s very sentimental about them and gets unnerved at the thought of car shows.

“I understand people want to see them, but it’s a different mentality to people that are fixing them that nice than the people that are just looking at them,” he laughed.

Travis said the process of putting together a classic car is not as hard as he thought it would be. Travis, who has worked on farm equipment in the past, said the restoration has been a learning process, but because classic cars are built with simpler systems and lack diagnostic computers, they aren’t as difficult to learn as modern vehicles.

However, Travis said, the Super Bee posed some challenges.

“The Super Bee was just a rolling shell,” he said. “It had been torn completely apart. You got no feel for what went where, and of course, I’m looking for parts for it. It was an empty beer can, is all it was when I got it.”

Travis also uses the restoration process to bond with his son, A.J. Travis.

The two found a 1970 Ford pick-up truck in Wyoming last summer, and plan to start on that when finished with the Super Bee.

Randi Shaffer is a reporter at the Morning Sun. She can be reached at 989-779-6059, rshaffer@michigannewspapers.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/randi.shaffer.